The Art Workers’ Guild in London is a great institution, set up by followers of William Morris, and providing a forum for those who work in craft, art and architecture. Fortnightly lectures for Brothers and their guests on a variety of topics are held in the Lecture Room attached to a beautiful 18th century building. In this room a bust of William Morris, a previous Master, looks down on all proceedings. The Art Workers’ Guild held an auction in November 2017 to raise money for roofing over the atrium to create exhibition space. As Brothers of the Guild, we were asked to produce work that could be auctioned, and this is mine.

I chose to write out this poem by the American Anne Bradstreet because it is one of my favourites. And I decided to set it out just a little bit differently. I designed it as a landscape book and made it wide and narrow. I fed two colours of Schmincke Calligraphy Gouache into a quill as I wrote (more on this here). I really like doing this as I feel that it represents two separate people coming together in a relationship, sometimes one colour, sometimes the other, but mostly a variable mix of the two. The treated vellum was a dream to write on, and the lettering came out very finely, as can be seen by the title where I have left in the pencil guidelines. (Note the upper pencil line for the poet’s name. I was enjoying writing so much that I rather generously flourished the letter ‘g’ and then wasn’t sure that the tiny writing for Anne’s name would show up with the loop of the flourish, so had to drop it down a bit!)

I wanted to ensure that the balance between the title page and the poem worked well. It wasn’t quite as easy as normal to get the measurements right with this unusual shape of book.

I selected the colours red and blue gouache and found hand-made paper which matched exactly that of the paint, and, with a white title page and ‘endpaper’ to ensure that the colour behind the vellum was the best to show it off well, I prepared a ‘liner’ of the dark blue paper which had been made in India, and a cover of stiff red paper, a paper which had been made in Thailand. I made deckle edges on both.

I sewed everything together with a dark blue ribbon, wrote the title on a piece of vellum from the same skin and attached it to the front cover. Everything seemed to work well together and I hope that the successful bidder enjoys their book.